


Incubation

by Flens Verpa (whydoihavethiskink), whydoihavethiskink



Series: The Contagion Saga [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Accidents, Age Difference, Anal Fisting, Anal Sex, Backstory, Bugcatching, Chamber Pots, Child Abuse, Come Marking, Diarrhea, Dickworms, Diseases, Dom/sub, Emetophilia, Enemas, F/M, Felching, First Time, Fisting, Internal Watersports, Klismaphilia, Laxatives, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Masturbation, Medical Assault, Medical Experimentation, Multiple Orgasms, Omorashi, Other, Parasites, Piss Enemas, Prostate Play, Rimming, Rubbing Stomach, Sadism, Scat, Scat Sex, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Shitting During Sex, Shitting on Penis, Sloppy Seconds, Soiling, Stomach Ache, Vomit, Voyeurism, Watersports, both ends
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2020-01-16 02:59:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 18,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18512512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whydoihavethiskink/pseuds/Flens%20Verpa, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whydoihavethiskink/pseuds/whydoihavethiskink
Summary: Flens Verpa and Flitch stop for a few days in Three Rivers, then journey north in search of novel plagues. Flitch begins to build his repertoire of pathogens. Verpa tells his story.





	1. Three Rivers

**Author's Note:**

> Tags may change as needed; obviously, not everything applies from the very first chapter! Don't worry; I update fast.

Flens Verpa and Flitch continued their journey to Three Rivers the next day. Verpa realized that he was being slowed by the dwelf’s awkward gait. Flitch did not so much walk as weave, wobbling on his ankles and seemingly constantly on the verge of spraining them. Verpa resolved to have him fitted for leg braces as soon as they got to the city. Flitch himself was used to the way he walked, so he moved his legs without much thinking about it. Instead, he focused on his stomach, trying to feel his new parasite moving within him (to his chagrin, he could not), and wondering if he’d finally get to be the one shitting worms. His cock hardened to where his balls started to ache and he could no longer bear the delicious urge, and so he told Verpa he needed to piss. Instead, he quickly masturbated, spraying a bush with sickly, sterile seed.

What he did not know was that Verpa was subtly watching. Verpa saw Flitch stroke himself to orgasm; the poor boy must have been unbearably excited to cum that fast. A quick dick was more than fine by Verpa; he liked to top, and he had a thing for people who couldn’t control themselves. If the boy’s bowels proved as leaky and excitable as his balls, he would be a fine traveling companion.

Three Rivers was not a particularly huge city, but it was definitely a city. The eponymous rivers ran through it, and there were many high bridges across them (high, to let barges through), with lifts for carts and livestock. Verpa dragged Flitch to a corsetmaker and had him measured for leg braces. The sum quoted horrified Flitch, but Verpa shrugged it off. Enabling Flitch to walk properly would save money, in the end. Next was the sort of clothier who sold ready-made and secondhand clothing cheap, and Flitch received two extra shirts, an extra pair of pants, and a knapsack to put them in. He could have leather gear after he had his leg braces and once they were sure he was done growing, Verpa said.

The boy now had enough clothing to do his laundry without going naked. Verpa left him at the inn, with strict instructions not to go anywhere or do anything, and went to go explore the microbial landscape of the trade city.

The well water contained the same old enteric strains, nothing significantly new. A privy by the west docks contained a strain of dysentery he hadn’t seen in this area before, but which was still familiar to him. There was a new strain of gonorrhea going around, what felt like a mutation of the one common to the area—“felt” being the closest word for his sense of the organism’s structure, or rather his reception of his worms’ sense of it—and Verpa acquired it during a very satisfying ten minutes in a fuckbooth too dark to see in. But there was nothing truly novel. Truth be told, Verpa was not very disappointed. It had been only a few months since his last visit, and with only two adult dickworms, he wasn’t very well equipped to control an unfamiliar organism. In fact, even his accustomed ones were trying to give him trouble; throughout the day, he’d had to tamp down low-grade fevers every so often with an effort of will. Normally he’d just ride out a spontaneous resurgence—it was the sort of thing that happened every few months, and he was used to it—but that would also mean shedding whatever was causing it, which could be several different organisms, and usually the ones most likely to try to proliferate were the most deadly. It would be just plain stupid to unleash a hemorrhagic fever in a temperate-climate town like Three Rivers, and not very much fun. Fever bleeding wasn’t nearly as dramatic as the stories always had it, and the death rates gave Verpa no satisfaction and caused a lot of nastiness. There was also Flitch to think about. His worm wasn’t yet acclimated to his system, and would never be quite as good as if it were engineered for his body. Verpa didn’t want to give it that difficult a test for a few weeks yet. They should start with diseases that didn’t kill anyone, anyway.

Flitch had been warned not to drink the water, so of course, he drank it. A lot of it. The only immediate result was needing to pee. He went to the privy, which was jammed way too close to the well, and sat on it. First he pissed, letting clear liquid out of his dick. Then he shat. It was solid, to his disappointment, stimulating his rim as it passed. But, that reminded him of Verpa’s penetration of him yesterday, and his teenage cock became quite stiff at the mere thought of it. Flitch stroked himself, thinking of Verpa’s massive, infested, and most certainly diseased penis, and of the comparatively fewer diseases in himself; the flux Verpa said he was still shedding, the worm and maybe some baby worms, and whatever lurked in the water he had just drunk. He imagined the pretty barmaid at the inn catching the flux from him and shitting herself, just splattering brown down her skirt as she poured beer for guests, not even realizing she was shitting as it pooled on the floor, and he came, splashing white on the privy floor. Flitch pulled up his pants and went back inside, waiting for Verpa.

He woke in the middle of the night, needing to shit. Flitch pulled out the chamber pot and sat over it, pleased to hear liquid spattering into it as he relaxed his anus. Unsurprisingly, the noise woke Verpa.

“You drank the water, didn’t you,” he said.

“Yeah,” admitted Flitch.

“That was stupid, since your worm’s still adjusting, but you’ll be fine. It’s a common enteric strain; I can smell it. Everyone has some; you’re only loose because it’s not one you’re used to.” Verpa spoke as if he were about to roll over and go back to sleep, but he was sitting up, one hand toying with his cock, as Flitch continued to release diarrhea into the chamber pot. Flitch was mostly concerned with emptying his bowels, but he was half-hard himself.

“How did you find out you were into this?” asked Flitch, between waves of liquid shit.

“Well,” said Verpa, considering. “I don’t suppose you’re sleeping much more tonight, anyway…”


	2. Lab Rat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flashback to Verpa's childhood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a pretty important part of Verpa's story, and explains a lot about him, but there's a lot of medical child abuse. Obviously for some people, this is a dream scenario, but for others, it could be squicky.

I didn’t just come into this interest like you did; I was made for it. Quite literally.

You’ve heard the stories of the Rubble Waste, certainly? Most of them have some basis in truth, though they’re horribly distorted. So, there was a wizard, though he had a bunch of flasks and tools instead of a spellbook, and he stole a child, or rather bought a just-weaned extra boychild off a dark elf band when food was stretched thin. Wasteland bands value girls.

I learned that part later, though. I don’t remember anything before his laboratory. My quarters had a rubber floor—that’s kind of like leather—and none of my toys were cloth, and sometimes the wizard would come in, wearing this white suit that covered his whole body, even his head, and give me medicine. Sometimes the medicine made me feel better; usually it made me sick. And that was the way things were. I didn’t question it; to a child, things just are. I had a little tube set in my chest to feed me, straight into the blood, for when I couldn’t keep food down. There’s still a scar, right here. He took it out, later. I’m very glad I didn’t have to do that myself.

But it’s another day, another swallow of “medicine” that tastes foul and will probably make you vomit or break out in an itchy rash, so what do you do? You eroticize it. You take this thing which invades your body and makes it do things you don’t want it to, and because there’s no way around it happening, you decide that yes, you actually do like those things. You still have to take the “medicine,” there’s still no choice, but at least you want it. And it _is_ a release or relief, when you finally do shit or vomit, or when the rash finally shows and you’re done with the waiting. When I finally figured out how to have an actual orgasm, several years later, it tapped right into that structure; I almost wished I could cum brown.

And then, of course, children mimic. So I had dolls, made of lacquered wood, washable, you know, and I would have them drink “medicine” and get sick too. That was what people did, after all. If I were the one giving the “medicine,” I was in control. As simple as that. I’d use the info-panel—that’s sort of like a book, maybe someday I’ll get to show you one—to look up different diseases, to figure out what I had this week, or to guess what a new medicine was going to turn out to be. There’s always at least a few hours of waiting, each time. Eventually, you learn to like the anticipation.

Those early years were rough. The wizard was tinkering with my body’s makeup, trying to make it stronger, but my…what’s the word you’ll understand, there’s so much technical stuff that’s lost outside the wastelands…my body’s defenses were still much the same as any child’s of my race, and anything that boosted them had the risk of going too far and turning my body against itself. I nearly lost my liver that way, turned yellow and everything. I don’t recommend it.

Eventually, the wizard hit on using parasites to stabilize me. See, the problem was trying to induce a permanent carrier state for diseases. A true carrier state is a sort of truce. Normally, either the body defeats the disease, or the disease defeats the body and that body dies. A truce is a rare, perilous thing. It’s very hard to make last. Sure, there are often temporary carrier states, as the body finishes shedding an illness, but those are a matter of weeks or months. That’s just a defeated army taking a while to send the troops home. No, the wizard wanted me to remain a carrier for everything I’d been exposed to, for the rest of my life. Originally, I don’t think he even cared about controlling the shedding, just turning it on and leaving it. By the time I was ten, I was a carrier for syphilis, several strains of herpes, gonorrhea, malaria, giardiasis, two types of dysentery, tonsil plague, and typhoid—but those are all illnesses where carrier states are fairly common, exceptions to the rule. Most of them aren’t actually very contagious outside of very narrow circumstances. The wizard wanted me to carry common plagues instead, the kind that sweep through every five or ten years. So far, the only one I’d succeeded in carrying was chickenpox, and it’s very painful and not particularly contagious when it flares. So he’d keep giving me potions to disable my body’s defenses, then re-infect me. I must’ve had measles at least six times. Can you even imagine?  
Anyway, eventually he turned his shaping arts from me, directly, to roundworms. The results were immediately better. I could shed chickenpox without having a painful outbreak. However, I needed a potion as well as the worms, and the worms kept dying. Eventually—and this I found out after the fact—he interbred them with a tiny parasite of the genitals, which ordinarily causes a form of the clap. He also made a few more changes to me, so my body would stop trying to defend itself against the worms. This time it was different; he said he had found the answer. Then he injected the worm eggs into my testicles. He had the kindness to numb them first. He did not, however, tell me that this would make me sterile. Like I was able to care about that kind of violation at that point, though. And I’d already had orchitis three times, so it’s quite possible I was already sterile anyway. Orchitis means your balls swell up. It’s much too painful to enjoy having, though I think I’d like seeing you have it. But, the worms certainly sealed the deal. It’s probably just as well. Children would only tie me to one place, when I’m supposed to be out and spreading my diseases all over the continent.


	3. Enteric Dawn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back to the present. Verpa and Flitch have some kinky fun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Entirely porn. You know what I write. It's hot and extremely gross.

“I don’t mean you,” said Verpa, immediately realizing that Flitch might still consider himself an inconvenient child. “You’re practically grown. It’s only small kids who have to stay in one place, or their mothers who already have lives tied to a town or farm.”

“No, I figured not, since you took me along,” said Flitch. He grimaced, and sat over the chamber pot again. Liquid splashed into more liquid.

“Gods, it’s so hot when you do that,” said Verpa, rubbing his cock again. Three worms poked out its dilated urethra, two almost as thick as Flitch’s little finger, one narrower, like a quill.

“How do you piss around those?” asked Flitch, before he could stop himself.

“It’s a bit dribbly,” admitted Verpa. “C’mere. I want to fuck you while your ass is still shitty.”

Flitch put the cover back on the chamber pot. He really wasn’t done yet. His guts felt distended, and gurgled and sloshed. However, the idea of Verpa’s monster cock fucking him, fucking into his shit and plugging it all into him, sounded much better than simple release. He tried to lower himself onto Verpa’s lap, but Verpa stopped him.

“You can try that when you’re used to being fucked. This’ll go better if I can direct it. Bend over the bed.” Verpa lined up his cock with Flitch’s smeared asshole and began to press into it, not really breaching the ring. “Now bear down like you’re shitting, and I’ll slip right in.”

Verpa slid into Flitch’s sloppy ass, lubricated by diarrhea and anal mucus. His new dysentery, so short on the heels of his both-ends flux, meant that his bowels were severely inflamed, snotting themselves at a phenomenal rate. As the giant cock bottomed out and returned for another thrust, Flitch felt a sharp cramp in his guts, and a wave of watery shit sped towards his rectum.

Verpa groaned with pleasure as he felt the liquid hit the head of his penis. He was actually fucking someone bowel-sick, fucking into the rush of their contagion. His worms tasted the bubbling cocktail of pathogens and enteric toxins and writhed with pleasure, transmitting their impressions to Verpa and adding to his pleasure. The boy’s inflamed membranes glided deliciously over the outside of his shaft, and inside it, the worms wriggled, both sensations enveloping his cock in spine-tingling pleasure.

Flitch felt the rush of liquid speed towards his exit, and then stop. The motion of Verpa’s dick made him feel like he was shitting, even as the pressure inside him built, so he got to experience the pleasures of expulsion and desperation at the same time, along with that of Verpa’s skilled and relentless hammering of his teenage prostate. His bowels convulsed, cramping painfully on liquid with nowhere to go, while a huge mass slid in and out of his raw ring. Flitch panted and moaned, thrusting back onto Verpa’s cock and also trying to rub his dick against the bedclothes. He was going to make such a mess when Verpa pulled out, even if Verpa didn’t piss in his ass again.

Verpa felt the familiar heat and pressure of orgasm rise in his worm-riddled prostate. Flitch’s infected ass was truly amazing, but he wanted to cum watching the boy shit out the load he’d plugged up inside him. He held the chamber pot ready with one hand, then pulled out, positioning the chamber pot between Flitch’s legs. There was a second’s pause, and then a waterfall of loose shit fell out of Flitch’s ass. Verpa stroked himself roughly, and soon splattered the boy’s back and shitting ass with wormy cum.

Flitch had felt Verpa pull out, and then, without any way of halting it, his bowels had released their liquid sickness explosively now that their phallic stopper was gone, the way one might fall over after pushing on a stuck door that suddenly gives way. Diarrhea thundered out of his ass, and then into what—to his relief—sounded like a chamber pot, with the splash of liquid on liquid, not liquid on bare floor. Something warm hit his ass and back; he realized that Verpa was cumming on him. Flitch rutted into the sheets as his ass dripped, hoping for his own satisfaction.

Verpa chuckled, pushing the chamber pot away now that the stream of brown had mostly stopped flowing from the boy’s ass. “Don’t worry, I won’t leave you wanting,” he told Flitch. Kneeling in front of Flitch’s ravaged, sloppy hole, he slipped in four fingers, then the tip of his thumb.

Flitch thought Verpa must already be up for a second round. His eyes widened as something even bigger than Verpa’s cock pressed into his hole. Pushing himself up on his forearms, he looked back, and realized that Verpa had his hand up to his wrist inside his ass.

Flitch had never even dreamed of something this extreme. He’d watched pretty girls at stool, and dreamed of giving some of them senna tea unawares to make their bowels loose while he watched, but he’d never really dreamed of fucking any of them, let alone with something as big as Verpa’s hand. The sensation was amazing. His raw, sore ass felt so full, like being achingly desperate for a massive shit, but instead of being inert and solid, Verpa’s hand moved, fingers wiggling against his sensitive insides and drumming against the mysterious gland of pleasure deep in his anus. His bowels gurgled again, stimulated by the motion in his anus, and Flitch shoved a hand under himself, rubbing not his penis but his tender, sore stomach, luxuriating in the luscious, bloating ache. Under Verpa’s relentless anal stimulation, he soon came, wetting the bedsheets with watery cum.

Verpa eased his hand out of Flitch’s ass, then sat down on the bed next to him. He positioned the chamberpot so Flitch could sit between his legs while using it. Flitch lay on his side for a bit, snuggled up next to Verpa and voluptuously rubbing his stomach, but soon jumped up to release another wave of runny diarrhea. He sat between Verpa’s legs for the rest of the night, feeling Verpa’s hardening, infested cock rub against his back, while Verpa rubbed his swollen stomach, as he intermittently voided his squittering, rumbling bowels into the chamberpot.


	4. Sick Lusts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Verpa brings Flitch to an old friend, to lost his penile virginity and catch some STDs.

Flitch’s bowels began to dry up as the sun rose in the sky, turning from wet liquid to disappointing paste. However, the corset-maker had not finished the leg braces, so they had to stay in Three Rivers for another couple days. Verpa had been scouting the markets for trade goods, but did not want to make such purchases until they were prepared to leave. Flitch did not even have that much to do. Verpa decided that it was time to teach him another nosological lesson.

He dragged Flitch to the meanest corner of town, to a dilapidated, stinking alley. An older human woman stood there, dressed in skimpy, tattered finery. Before they approached her, Verpa whispered in Flitch’s ear.

“This woman has been a prostitute for over twenty years. There are few forms of sanitary protection available in these parts, and this woman can’t afford even those. As a result, she harbors several sexual diseases. That tent in your pants tells me I made the right decision telling you this. Tell me, have you ever penetrated anyone before?”

Flitch shook his head, no. Who in their right mind would fuck a dwelf? Verpa had, but he could hardly be considered _sane_.

“Your virgin flesh is going to sink into her diseased cunt and marinate in its juices, with all those germs infecting it—at least if you didn’t just spurt all over yourself,” he added, as Flitch reeled with pleasure against him.

“I’m fine!” said Flitch. “Just…got a little wobbly. In the knees.”

“Just follow my lead. Don’t be shy. We’re paying her.” Verpa walked into the alley.

“Dick Maudlin! Looking for a good time again?” The prostitute obviously knew Verpa well. Flitch wondered how much she knew of his tastes.

“The very same, Kitty. And I’ve brought another. Don’t worry; you’ll get double and a bonus.” Coin changed hands.

Kitty peered at Flitch. “Is he your kid?”

“If only! More of a ‘prentice, you could say.”

“Stupid of me. You shoot worms, not seeds. If you want to tell people you sired him, though, they’d never know the difference.” She turned to Flitch, trailing a practiced hand down his chest. “So you’re to have me. Glad he picked a mule. No chance of taking pregnant.” As when Verpa said it, the slur carried no malice from her lips. That, as much as the prospect of the diseases between her legs, aroused Flitch. As Kitty began to untie his trouser strings, he had to count his own breaths in order not to spill all over her hand.

“After everything you’ve caught, you’re _still_ fertile?” Verpa asked Kitty.

“And I keep miscarrying them, too. If I get much older, it’s bound to stop eventually.”

“Guess we’ll have to keep trying to fix that,” said Verpa. Standing behind her, he slipped his hand up her dress and cupped her slit, after a moment moving up to massage her ass.

Flitch’s legs threatened to give out. Kitty had him sit down on a makeshift bed, really a wooden pallet covered with a dirty, stained blanket. She pulled up her dress, giving him a full view of her hairy cunt before she lowered herself onto Flitch’s straining, virgin prick.

Those wet, flapping lips did not _look_ diseased, or smell like it. Any chancres or sores had long since faded, and in the alley’s half-light, discharge was indistinguishable from a lubricating douche or arousal. Flitch knew venereal contagion was usually invisible, having heard his own mother complain so much about it. Still, it was a slight disappointment that such an infamous cunt should appear so _normal_. Flitch watched where his penis sank into it, as Kitty expertly clenched around him, and tried to revive his earlier fetish-fueled arousal. Maybe she instead had a sore on the inside. He did smell her juices, though they were not foul, more like warm brine. Infected juices, he reminded himself. Those double lips fluttering around his shaft were dripping with liquid contagion, soaking him in it, seeping under his foreskin and infecting the tender flesh there. He could almost feel the disease sinking in—no, that was just arousal, hurrying him to the point of no return.

Then the rhythm changed, jarring Flitch back to the start of the climb. Verpa had mounted Kitty from behind, shoving his infested cock into her well-used ass. He began to thrust, and his balls slapped against Flitch’s.

Flitch thrust into that wet cavern, wide and loose around his narrow teenage prick, twisting his hips to try to rub himself against the slick sides of it. He wanted to smear her diseases against his flesh as thoroughly as possible. Even now, her diseased discharge was trickling into his pisshole, infecting and inflaming it. At that thought, Flitch came, sending his watery spurts deep into her teeming heat.

Verpa continued to plough Kitty’s ass, fucking deep into it. He heard Flitch cry out in climax, and as soon as the boy’s prick slipped out, he moved his own cock to her cunt, which still dripped with Flitch’s seed. Covered with the germs of her ass, he thrust into her diseased cunt as well, mingling the two sources of infectious vileness together. Perhaps this assault of filth would finally give Kitty a proper womb-fever to render her sterile. In any case, she seemed to actually enjoy it as Verpa pounded his massive club into her; she moaned and wrapped her legs around his waist, gripping him tightly. Flitch watched, his cock hardening again. Verpa spent himself, filling her cunt to overflowing with infested jism.

Kitty reached for Flitch again. “Looks like you’ve got another round in you,” she said.

Flitch eagerly rubbed his dick in the mix of Kitty’s fluids and Verpa’s spend. Her nether lips felt so good that he almost added to the mess, then and there. But he was on his second round, so he held out long enough to sink into her creampied channel, his prick squelching in Verpa’s cum. The feeling of their mixed spend trickling down his balls was what undid him, and he spent again in the oozing mess, thrusting deep into her slick, sloppy cunt.

A few hours later, Flitch found that it burned to pee. Verpa told him that, with the worm, it should clear up in a few days, and in the meantime he should make the most of the experience. Flitch didn’t find the burning particularly erotic, but then he realized: he was now infected and contagious. Indeed, there was even a slight, whitish discharge leaking from his prick. He anticipated developing even more diseases, which would take longer to show than the clap—up to a few weeks. Flitch could hardly wait.

 

Flitch’s leg braces were ready the next morning. The corset-maker showed him how to put them on over his breeches, and he spent the rest of the day following Verpa around the warehouse district, learning to walk in them. The restricted motion felt distinctly odd, but his ankles and knees hurt less, and he moved much faster. Verpa bought several pounds of spices and colored threads, as well as travel food, and then they set off along the northern river, following the road that ran alongside it. Flitch wondered why they weren’t taking passage on one of the mule-drawn boats traveling upstream, but Verpa joked about it being too much of a temptation to infect everyone, and then the boat generally didn’t go anywhere. Flitch suspected that Verpa had actually spent too much money on Flitch’s leg braces, his new trade stock, and Kitty.

“Does Kitty know what you do?” Flitch asked, as the city shrank behind them.

“Mostly. She knows what the worms are for, and that I try to catch diseases. She doesn’t know I get off on starting plagues. I have quite the history with her, but there’s a gap between what I’ve told you and when I met her. I might as well tell you.”


	5. Willing Subject

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Verpa's time with the "wizard," part II.

Once the dickworms took root, I became much more mildly affected by the various diseases. I was able to achieve a continuous shedder state for several common childhood diseases, and through various potions, I could transform into an asymptomatic, non-contagious carrier and vice versa, without ever clearing the infection. Additionally, I began to undergo puberty, and my proclivities matured and solidified from their infantile form. I began to experience genital arousal in response to disease symptoms or the thought or depiction of them—and yes, I thought of it in such terms, because the info-panel and the wizard always used scholarly words. I did not learn the more common phrases until I was closer to your age. I had to practice swearing, if you can believe it.

Now that I was old enough to understand it, and because I had become a success so far, the wizard began to tell me of some of his plans. At first, I had been supposed to be a solution to the decay of governments and medical technologies. At one time, there had existed methods of inoculation that prevented many diseases, and emperors to ensure that such methods were used on most of the populace. However, the ancient order collapsed, and many of the methods were lost or no longer feasible if known, and governments became too weak and fragmented to maintain what was left. As a result, plagues proliferated. I had been supposed to be a sort of epidemic inoculation, spreading extra-contagious but mild strains of common plagues to prevent the more virulent ones.

But, now that I was a success, he could replicate his work on other dark elf children. He’d chosen my species, he said, because we’re the longest lived of the anthropoid species, and because our dark skin makes it more difficult to detect rashes without close observation. Now, I think also because many think little of us and we’re not likely to be missed. What governments remain are mostly humans, descended from those who were least changed by the collapse. Is a human lord going to care if a migrant dark elf child goes missing or was bought? For two thousand years, back to the dawn of the ancient civilization, that answer has been ‘no,’ or indeed, the rulers encouraged it. There will always be people hungry enough to trade a child to a wizard, hoping that whatever happens to it, at least it will be fed.

In typical wizardly hubris, and perhaps encouraged by my obvious perversion (my erections in response to certain subjects being obvious), he expanded his plan. I wasn’t just a measles blanket, now. Instead, I was to become an archive of diseases, so that my blood could be used to make potions for a universal remedy. I willingly agreed, though I was more excited to experience the various diseases than to be some sort of panacea. Based on my info-panel research, I even suggested illnesses to try, and the wizard generally acquiesced, though it sometimes took him months to obtain specimens. I became infected with so many increasingly exotic diseases that I almost lost count. There was a sliding drawer to bring things into or out of my cell, and it became so that simply the noise of it became a source of arousal. I’d find a new tincture or cream or capsule, and I would become throbbingly hard, and my worms would begin writhing inside my penis. They sense the rush of blood to it. When it was a cream, meaning generally a skin disease, I often smeared it on my penis, using it as a lubricant to bring myself to orgasm, imagining what it would do to me.

I had no shame about any of this, you see. I wore no clothing, because then the wizard would have to clean it and it would be a hazard to himself or others; my cell was kept quite warm instead. I was never punished for erections or masturbation—nor for anything at all, save for trying to hurt or bite the wizard or resisting my medicine, when I was quite small. I don’t recall being toilet trained, but I read later that during that time, the cell’s automata were set to emit an unpleasant noise if they detected excreta outside the toilet. The wizard had the sense not to give me diarrheal diseases during this time, on purpose anyway. It apparently happened a couple times as complications of something else. But I believe part of what the wizard wanted to learn was the mental effect of enduring so many infections. Developing a fetish for it was probably the best possible outcome.

Well, the only one, because there were never any other children. Our enthusiasm was our downfall. The wizard was using pre-collapse technologies and safety precautions, and it was inevitable that something should fail. If he had stuck to common diseases, such an accident would have been of little consequence, a few weeks’ discomfort at most, or no infection at all—but we had not.

It took me several days to realize something was wrong. By necessity, I had little direct contact with the man, anyway. But, he had never failed to feed me before, without it being medically necessary, and by this time, he tended to inform me about the details of my medical procedures, because I obviously enjoyed it, usually becoming erect. I don’t think he titillated me intentionally, mind you; he simply saw it as a sign of a positive mental reaction. Now, though, there was nothing. There was no response from the intercom. (That’s kind of like a speaking tube in a great house.) My cell was locked, as it always was, and I could not break out of it.

After three days of this, the tower’s automata ran down. In great good fortune, the engine powering them ran on oil, not deathrocks as some use, or my bones would be there still. The lights went out, and the locks released. Dizzy with hunger, I crawled out of my cell, into a room I had seen my whole life but never set foot in. There, I found the body of the wizard.

He had been a high elf. I had never seen his face before. Always, he had worn protective gear. In some way I do not know, it had finally failed him. He had died only shortly before, perhaps even as I crawled to him, but he had been too ill to feed the engine for some days. Blood streaked his face, still slowly trickling from his mouth, nose, and eyes. His head faced the pantry where he kept my food. Even while deathly sick, he’d been trying to care for me.

Of course, once I found the pantry, I ate plentifully, not bothering to wash my hands. I’d never needed to, and even if I had been one to avoid serious illness, I was too famished to think. Unsurprisingly, I became sick a few days later. I had figured out how to start the building’s engine, and the code to unlock my cell again (it was a system of numbered buttons, and the right ones were obviously worn, and then I propped it open), so at least I was warm enough, and I’d had the sense to drag the wizard’s body out of the building before it started stinking. I had chills and pains, and then purging, but I don’t really remember much of it; the fever was too high. Normally I got medicines to help control the symptoms. This time, there was no one to give them to me. Instead, it was like a drunken, erotic nightmare. I hallucinated giant versions of the particles of illness holding me down and wrapping around my penis; there were climaxes, but I don’t know if I came or shat. I never bled, though. The worms protected me from the deadliest symptom.

When the worst of the fever broke, I was skeleton-thin and covered in vomit and shit. I turned on the cell’s shower to clean it and myself—the ceiling had a mechanism that simulated rain, so it could be cleaned. I put on clothes for the first time, the wizard’s bathrobe from his living quarters—contrary to the stories, wizards mostly wear trousers when they can get them—and refueled the engine.

I lived in the dead wizard’s tower for several years. There was plenty of oil for the engine; the wizard kept tanks of algae that had been altered to produce it, and which were fertilized with shit. I read all his notes, learning what he’d done to me, and all his personal books. He kept his notes on paper, but his books were mostly on a really nice portable info-panel. Almost all of them were pre-collapse. It was during this time that I developed the beginnings of my attunement to the worms—I could start or stop the shed of everything at once, without potions, after a couple years. Learning to select which diseases to shed came much later.

Eventually, though, I had learned pretty much all I could from what was in the tower. Once, the info-panels had been able to connect to a sort of invisible network of knowledge that spanned the world, but after the collapse, they were limited to what they could store, or some extra “books” that they could have inserted, and eventually I had read everything of interest to me, and quite a lot that wasn’t. I was also running out of food that didn’t come from algae tanks. With only one person producing excrement instead of two, I couldn’t fertilize both the tanks and the hothouse garden, so I picked the tanks. But I knew there was a world out there, that some form of civilization remained after the collapse, and that if I could manage not to starve to death or get murdered for being a useless outsider, or get myself killed crossing the Rubble Waste for that matter, I was all but immune to the worst of the dangers of it. I shut down the algae tanks, storing the last of the green goo as spores; packed the wizard’s clothes (long ago tailored to fit myself), the last of the food, and the wizard’s maps, and set out from the tower.


	6. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A brief return to the present.

“So then you met Kitty?” asked Flitch.

“No. It was still a while before I met her. I had to get across the Rubble waste, and that was no easy task. I’d never even walked so far as a mile in my life before then. Also, even though you know they’re scaled down, maps make everything look so much smaller. So I actually spent a couple years roaming the Rubble Waste.”

“Where are we camping tonight?” asked Flitch.

“There’s a small town a couple hours ahead. It’ll probably be dark before we get there, but I doubt we’ll have trouble. How’re you doing with the braces?”

“I think I’ve got blisters, but it’s like new shoes, I reckon.”

“Put a salve on them when we get to the inn. Blood poisoning is _not_ one of the fun diseases.”

“I knew someone who died of it. One day he was fine, and then the next day he was sick and I wasn’t allowed to visit him, and then two days later he was dead. He looked so…normal, in the coffin.” Flitch shuddered. “Like, there ought to be something you can see. Otherwise, it’s just _wrong_. It shouldn’t.”

“Not wrong. You can’t control it. Therefore it feels wrong to you.” Verpa’s statement had the finality of someone who has thought about a subject a very great deal. “And it’s rarely invisible, blood poisoning. He probably had a wound, and it would have been swollen and red, you just couldn’t see it in the coffin. He probably cut a foot on something outside.”

“He did have shoes on, in the coffin. Well, grave-shoes. No one’s that rich to bury people in real shoes.”

“Now, cancer, or malaria, sometimes that’s invisible. But it’s usually not quick. And malaria mostly kills babies, when it kills. You should bounce right back, when we get to the tropics.”

“You sure they’ll let us into the inn with me wearing the braces?” asked Flitch, changing the subject.

“Since we look like we have coin, yeah. Flitch, lots of people in these parts wear leg braces. Crestley’s too poor for much, but people with means? They do, if they need them. This isn’t the Waste, full of scavenged pre-Collapse medical tech. This isn’t even _near_ the waste. So there’s lots of people who’ve had infantile paralysis or a break that didn’t heal right. You’re…rarer, maybe it’s something to do with being a mule, but cripples in general aren’t unusual, which is what you’ll be taken for at worst, and even without the braces you’re only half a cripple. With them, you actually walk without looking like a horse dying of strychnine.”

Flitch laughed, the air all but punched out of him. He continued giggling, mumbling something about the horse, until he had to sit down on the roadside. Verpa looked at him, one eyebrow raised in alarm, and checked him for a fever.

“I’m fine!”gasped Flitch. “Just. Strychnine. Horse.”

“I admit it’s a striking image, which is why I chose it, but I don’t see how…”

“Because I’m a mule! Get it?”

“Oh!” said Verpa, and laughed, though much less uproariously than Flitch. “Seriously, though. You need to calm down.” He crouched beside Flitch and began rubbing his back. It worked for hiccups, sometimes.

Flitch tried to stop laughing. It didn’t work for longer than a few seconds. He’d get to half a minute, mostly by holding his breath, and then something would set him off again. Horses. Why was that word so damnedly funny?

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he gasped.

“Well, I’d guess the last few days have been kind of a lot,” Verpa pointed out.

It was true. Inside of a week, Flitch had been violently caught masturbating, threatened with death, dragged away from the only home and people he knew, deflowered in two and a half different ways (the “half” being the fist up his ass, which he hadn’t known was even remotely physically possible), made to change the entire way he walked, and had shared his deepest secret with two complete strangers. What was he even to do with all that? His hysterical laughter finally turned to sobs, and he cried on the side of the road, comforted by his…friend? Abductor? Companion. That much was clear; Flitch was certainly stuck with his company for the time being. Was he afraid of Verpa? Of what he could do? Maybe. He wasn’t sure. Verpa seemed to be trying to _protect_ him, from both their worst excesses. He didn’t _want_ to go back, Flitch realized. He missed his drunken, poxy mother and the Crestley market, but he wanted the company of a like mind more. He wanted to see new places and learn, to be more than a mule, a pickpocket, and a privy-peeping pervert. He wanted more of this strange man’s story. And, of course, being an adolescent, he wanted more of the mindblowing, incredibly depraved sex. Flitch sniffled and wiped his nose.

“Sssh,” Verpa was saying. “Let it all out.” Just as he would if he were purging, Flitch supposed. Maybe it was like Flitch was having some kind of flux of the mind? Flitch turned and kissed Verpa desperately, tears and snot still wet on his cheeks. Verpa returned the kiss, seeming surprised, but oddly enough did not take it any further, instead holding him, squishing his face against the leather of his jacket. Ever after, Flitch would associate that smell with safety and peace.

“Are we going to infect anyone in the next town?” Flitch asked.

“Probably not. It’s too soon. You could try fucking someone and giving them your clap, though.”

“No one wants me. Except you, I guess.”

“Someone out there’s into dwelfs. It’s a lot less rare than us, I’d guess. Maybe it’ll be a village girl in Hillhaven. I wouldn’t know about it, not being a dwelf.”

“Well, at least it’s one more on a pile of things to wank about. A pretty girl who likes me so much she’s willing to drink senna tea and shit in a bucket for me….”

“We can’t fuck here in the road,” said Verpa. “It’s going to be dark soon. We should get moving. Do you need help getting up?”

“I think I can manage,” said Flitch, shakily pulling himself to his feet with a grunt. It felt tremendously weird to have his knees bend only one direction each. Verpa was right; the evening star was already high in the sky, and the clouds on the right-hand side of the road were streaking pale pink.

“So, want to hear about my time in the Rubble Waste?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Flitch really has been through a lot. He's definitely in one of the better situations he could have ended up in, but it's still a lot to process, at the moment.


	7. In the Waste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Verpa briefly recounts his time in the Rubble Waste, until he is interrupted by present events.

I was not a particularly good navigator. I did my best to avoid the death zones—yes, those legends are real, though it’s not magic per se—but in spite of my efforts, I came across a sign in archaic letters, almost worn down by centuries of rain and dusty wind. I squinted at it.

THIS PLACE IS A MESSAGE… AND PART OF A SYSTEM OF MESSAGES… PAY ATTENTION TO IT! SENDING THIS MESSAGE WAS IMPORTANT TO US. WE CONSIDERED OURSELVES TO BE A POWERFUL CULTURE.

THIS PLACE IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR…NO HIGHLY ESTEEMED DEED IS COMMEMORATED HERE… NOTHING VALUED IS HERE.

WHAT IS HERE IS DANGEROUS AND REPULSIVE TO US. THIS MESSAGE IS A WARNING ABOUT DANGER.

THE DANGER IS IN A PARTICULAR LOCATION… IT INCREASES TOWARD A CENTER… THE CENTER OF DANGER IS HERE… OF A PARTICULAR SIZE AND SHAPE, AND BELOW US.

THE DANGER IS STILL PRESENT, IN YOUR TIME, AS IT WAS IN OURS.

THE DANGER IS TO THE BODY, AND IT CAN KILL.

THE FORM OF THE DANGER IS AN EMANATION OF ENERGY.

THE DANGER IS UNLEASHED ONLY IF YOU SUBSTANTIALLY DISTURB THIS PLACE PHYSICALLY. THIS PLACE IS BEST SHUNNED AND LEFT UNINHABITED.

I had heard of such things. I also knew that the last line was untrue. The collapse itself had “substantially damaged this place physically.” The elements had spread that danger further. Just by being close enough to see the plaque—and I don’t know how the ancients expected anyone to be able to understand it without education in their language; the script and many of the words have changed—I was already at risk of serious harm. Obviously, I was quite far off from where I thought I had been. I immediately walked in the other direction.

I climbed over a vast wreck of fallen, crumbling concrete, and suddenly I was in an unknown camp. At first I did not realize what I saw. Keep in mind that I’d never seen any real people beyond the “wizard”—which isn’t really the right word for him, as I’m sure you’re aware right now. And he had always been covered in that protective suit. But I’d seen enough ancient pictures to realize what was happening when someone actually left one of the ragged tents and pointed a crossbow at me. Inspired by ancient art of this type of confrontation, I raised my hands above my head, fingers spread to show I had no conventional sort of weapon.

Fortunately, the “wizard” had raised me to speak the local language. It’s closer to that of the ancients than most others, due to the relative prevalence of tech, but it still sounds different. The way the script is written has also evolved. However, the main difference really is a system of pronunciation. A wastelander today could easily communicate with a pre-collapse person through text, assuming they used a rather archaic style of script, but they would be unintelligible to each other’s hearing.

But anyway, that’s not particularly relevant. I’m just saying, it could easily have been otherwise, and then I would be long dead.

“Who are you?” asked the crossbow wielder. The voice was male, with tones of mature adulthood.

This was actually a rather difficult question. I knew what the “wizard” had called me, but that was hardly a name, except insomuch as I had never been called anything else. It would also do the opposite of allaying suspicion. I thought fast. “My name is Kalki,” I said, taking the name of a character from one of the “wizard’s” books—one whom, I might add, I did not in the least physically resemble. It was also just a stupid choice, considering the source, which you’ll understand if you ever get to read it. Fortunately, no one in this camp ever showed any sign of getting the reference. I tell you this name, because that is still how I am known in those parts, and should we ever go there, or if you should have to go alone, you too should know it.

“And where are you from and what’s your business, Kalki?”

“I’m the son of a shaper, from back that way a few days.” (I pointed, or rather waved in that direction, never lowering my hand below shoulder height.) “I don’t know if the place has a name. It’s made of cinderblocks, with a sheet metal roof on part of it, and it has an attached greenhouse. The shaper died a few years ago, and I’m running out of food I didn’t grow and I’ve read everything in the house.”

See, “wizards”? The ones who alter the essences of living beings, such as plants or animals, are called shapers. They’re completely different than the kind who use spellbooks. The kind who use spellbooks probably were, in fact, created by shapers. Very likely, their spellbooks are either covert tech or completely unnecessary to how their powers work. Still generally best not to mess with them, because wherever it comes from, spellbook-wizards are probably every bit as powerful as you’ve been told, and generally won’t have any qualms about trying to kill you if you do something like that.

The crossbow still had not been lowered. “What was the shaper’s name?”

“I always called him ‘Papa.’ Sometimes people called him ‘Doctor,’ though there were almost never people, and I was never allowed to see them. I don’t think he used his given name.” I was getting very tired of holding my arms up.

“That does sound like Doc,” said the man, lowering the crossbow. “Never knew he had a kid, but I never actually went inside his place, either. Hadn’t been able to get him to the door in a while, not that I’m past there much, but I thought he just wasn’t wanting visitors.”

“I was trying to cross the waste,” I said, slowly lowering my arms. The blood rushed back into them, painfully. “I thought I was following the map all right, but I almost ended up in a death zone a little bit ago.”

The man huffed through his nose. “Do you have any idea how big the waste is? Not just numbers. There is absolutely no way you could get to the edge of it, in any direction, on what you’re carrying. Join us, or join another band, do something to earn your keep, and then when we travel close to the edge of the waste, then you can go, if you still want to.”

At the time, I had no idea how generous that offer was. Many bands would simply have conscripted me and put me in debt bondage for the food I ate. Instead, Jorm the Wolf-shot offered me a fair job in his band, herding geeps across the waste. He also gave me a pair of good boots, sized to my feet—geep-herders rarely have any shortage of leather—and taught me how to shoot a crossbow. I don’t carry one now, since it’s too bulky, but I’m still a pretty good shot. Herders use them to kill wolves and other predators.

I liked the job pretty well. For one thing, I learned the nomadic ways that still serve me well today. For another, it was solitary. I was very much afraid that my diseases would get out of control and kill the rest of the band, who in turn were the only reason I was able to stay alive. At times, I’d have breakthrough fevers, just a few days of minor chills for me, but I feared it was the hemorrhagic fever that had killed the shaper. The fact that the geeps never caught it reinforced my suspicions; joint fever causes geeps and cattle to have spontaneous abortions. It still could have been one of the other diseases, but I’d never experienced such things before the hemorrhagic fever. Then again, the shaper might have been medicating me. He didn’t always record medications very well, unless it had a novel or agenda-focused purpose.

These concerns led me to resume my attempts to interface with the dickworms. After some months of trying, eventually I could control from where I was shedding diseases, such as from my gut alone. By the time the geep herds next wandered to the north edge of the Rubble Waste, which was a few years, I had learned to interpret the worms’ knowledge of the different types of disease particles, and to release only certain ones, at least some of the time. It was still very crude. I have had a great deal of time to refine it in the years since.

Anyway, I had crossed the waste, and Jorm let me go, allowing me to keep the boots and clothes I had been given during my time with his band. So then…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "This place is not a place of honor" is a real text, written by scientists who were trying to figure out how to warn future, possibly less technologically advanced generations about nuclear waste sites.
> 
> "Geeps" are mutated and genetically modified sheep-goat hybrids who are able to eat nearly anything, including some of the more decayed concrete in the Rubble Waste. Because of this, they are the main livestock there, raised for milk, meat, and wool. Most herder groups are nomadic. The animals are common enough outside the Waste that it would not make sense for Verpa to explain them to Flitch.
> 
> Comments are appreciated!


	8. Hillhaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flitch and Verpa spend the night in Hillhaven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, A Chapter! Week from hell was followed by recovering from the week from hell, plus Windows being a shit. Had to reboot it in safemode to get Word to display anything right. Then the problem just stopped even after I went out of safemode. I'd restarted it before, which didn't fix it, so IDEKWTF. I'm hoping the Wacom tablet drivers weren't the problem, because I'd like to try drawing something now that I've got this chapter sorted. On the plus side, it's about 2000 words, and fulla porn.

Verpa paused his narrative. Ahead of them, on the road, a light bobbed, very like a lantern. This was because it was, in fact, a lantern, held by a man in rather poorly fitting scale armor.

“Who goes there?”

“Tim, you know me!” called Verpa. “Ivak Assan, here just a few weeks ago.”

“Ah, now I see you! Who’s that with you?”

“I picked up a prentice. Carries a pack well, and much better than leaving a town with a layabout.”

“He got a name?”

“Unfaad Muller,” said Flitch, remembering his alias.

“Go on to town, then. I think it’s going to rain, later, so no sense holding you up.” The watchman saluted, clapping his free hand over his heart, then went back into his roadside hut.

“Did I do okay?” asked Flitch, once they were out of earshot.

“Perfectly,” said Verpa. “Remember, I’m a respected trader. Not a bigwig, like that one with the manor in Crestley, but definitely respectable. In some places I get trouble for being a dark elf, but around here, not much. Three Rivers is too diverse and too focused on trade for any one species to be singled out, and the smaller towns are usually too homogeneous to have formed coherent stereotypes, and not enough people read to get them that way. By the way, can you read?”

“Yeah. A little.”

“Good. We’ll have to find a way for you to practice, but at least you understand the basic concept.”

The inn was not very full. Verpa paid for a room and two bowls of stew, which came with complementary black bread. Flitch shoveled down the bland mush of overcooked meat and turnips, suddenly very tired. Verpa was using the stew as an opportunity to sell salt to the innkeeper “at the best prices you’ll see this season.”

Verpa shook him awake. Flitch realized he’d fallen asleep on the bar counter, with bread still in his mouth. The innkeeper looked amused. Groggily, Flitch grabbed his knapsack and followed Verpa and the innkeeper to their room for the night, up stairs that were really more like a ladder.

They weren’t left the candle. Evidently, the innkeeper skimped on more than salt. The window was unshuttered, though, and the moon lit the room dimly. Both Flitch and Verpa were well adapted to see in the dark. The sloped ceiling made plain that this was really part of an attic, perhaps a quarter of the upper floor. Which would mean two private rooms, and one common bed-down. Flitch wondered if there was even anyone else staying at the inn. Verpa, he’d noticed, liked to keep apart from other travelers.

The single bed was a straw tick on what looked more like a shipping pallet than a frame. The linen sheet was coarse but clean, and a woolen blanket lay folded on one end. Verpa was already sitting on the edge, taking off his boots. Brutal things, those boots; worn, dark leather, with steel caps on the toes that ended in a blunt but formidable point. Flitch struggled with his own leg braces, their buckles still unfamiliar.

“Need help?” Verpa asked.

“No, I’ve got to learn to do this,” said Flitch. He intended to keep using the things, and not just to be nice to Verpa. He had never walked so far in his life, but his knees and ankles hurt much less than usual. He’d never considered before that other people’s legs didn’t. Eventually, he got one brace off, and started on the other. Verpa was already down to his shirt, his pants and jacket folded on the floor. Verpa was watching him, Flitch realized with a thrill, though he quickly got distracted by the buckles. The leather was too new, and very stiff.

“Come sit in the moonlight,” Verpa said, when Flitch finally managed to undress. “You said earlier you might have blisters.” In the moonlight, of course, meant on Verpa’s lap.

In the moonlight, there were no blisters, only some slight red spots. Verpa rubbed some salve on them, anyway. His hands lingered on Flitch’s thighs and then trailed up. “Leaking already,” he said, approvingly.

“It’s been doing that all day,” said Flitch, arching into the touch. “’S the clap, remember?”

“That makes it even better,” said Verpa. Flitch felt the man’s hardness pressing against his rump. “Speaking of, when’s the last time you had a piss?”

Dammit. “On the road, after I…” broke down, was probably the word.

“You should, before this goes further. Wouldn’t want you to lose control and soil the bed. We’d have to pay for it.”

“I’m not a baby!”

“It can happen if you’re fucked on a full bladder. You wouldn’t even realize you were doing it. Besides, I want to watch you.”

Oh. Flitch felt himself an idiot for not realizing. He slipped off Verpa’s lap and grabbed the chamberpot from the corner. Standing in front of Verpa, he pissed into it, a slow trickle, biting his lip against the burning. It was a relief to get it all out, though. He felt lighter, and the dull ache above his cock had gone. In front of him, Verpa was stroking himself. Flitch went to him.

He straddled Verpa’s lap and kissed him, thrilling in how their cocks rubbed together. One of Verpa’s hands slipped down and cupped his ass, a finger breaching the ring. It burned, but Flitch reveled in it, in the way the slight pain sent shivers of pleasure to his prick. He wasn’t going to last long like this, and he didn’t care, as he came up for air and then dove into that kiss again. He’d never thought lips could be a site of such pleasure. It didn’t matter what his cock did; he’d still have his ass to give to Verpa. Verpa had two fingers in his ass now, and he rode them, pressing his pleasure gland against them, as his cock rubbed against Verpa’s stomach.

Flitch felt the orgasm hit, felt the clenching as he spurted onto Verpa, but the pleasure didn’t stop. The fingers in his ass kept moving, and though his ass got more sensitive, it wasn’t painful the same way his cock probably would be if he tugged it right now. Between kisses, he begged for Verpa to put it in him, to fuck him, to fill and take him.

Verpa grabbed the tin of salve and smeared it on his cock, leaning back to have enough space between himself and Flitch to do it. He decided that this time he would take Flitch face-to-face, even if it was a more difficult position. “Kneel across me,” he told the boy. Flitch was loose from fingering and cumming, and Verpa actually got the head in without much of a problem. After that, it was a matter of letting gravity and the salve do their work. Maybe it was just a trick of the moonlight, but he thought he saw a slight bulge in Flitch’s stomach once he was finally seated.

Flitch rode Verpa’s monstrous cock for all he was worth. Its thickness continually pressed on his gland, and the slight changes in angle just increased the pleasure. He rocked his hips rapidly, making the cock thrust in and out by only an inch or so, but two or three times per second. Flitch thought he was cumming again—he wasn’t sure; the usual spasms were drowned out by the rapid movement inside him, if they were even happening. It still felt like cumming, though, or being right on the edge of it.

“I can feel your shit against my cock,” Verpa said. Flitch moaned. “It’s not as good as if you were scouring, but it’s an interesting sensation, and it’s still filthy. I wish you could shit on my cock. Someday, when we don’t need to worry about keeping the bed clean, I’ll make you cum from every part of your body, expelling filth everywhere. It’s an amazing release.” Maybe if they found the laboratory where he grew up, Verpa thought. If it still stood. The room he’d grown up in would be perfect for such play. Verpa imagined Flitch vomiting and pissing while riding his cock, and finally came, pulsing seed against shit. He slid out, rubbing his sensitive, softening cock against Flitch’s crack and balls for a few aftershocks.

Flitch was holding onto Verpa with one hand and furiously rubbing his prick with the other. It all felt so good. He was leaking slick fluid, and he rubbed it all over his cock, heightening the pleasurable surges tingling through him. As the pleasure continued, he felt a couple weak spurts of fluid, but no end to the pleasure, until Verpa pulsed within him and slipped out. Flitch whimpered.

Verpa swiped up some of Flitch’s cum on his finger, tasting it. “Four kinds of clap in you. Well done.”

Flitch again whimpered in arousal, still stroking himself. Verpa told him to kneel on the bed. Then, to Flitch’s shock, he felt Verpa’s tongue on his bunghole, licking his own cum out of his filthy ass. The teasing flickering against his sensitive rim was incredible, and he found himself spurting again within moments. Was that three, or four? Flitch wasn’t sure.

“That’s…wow,” he gasped, dazedly.

“Would you like to do it to me?” Verpa asked. Turning, he presented his muscled ass to Flitch.

Did Flitch ever. The bowels-eye offered to Flitch was decently clean, but a bit protruding and hairy, and it smelled like the sweat of a man who wore leather pants on a warm day. What unseen contagions lurked there? Flitch didn’t know, and he wanted to experience them all. Tentatively, not really knowing how to do this, he pressed his face to Verpa’s buttocks and licked.

The taste was salty, a bit metallic. Knowing it was Verpa’s ass, Flitch couldn’t get enough of it. He thrust his tongue into that musky pucker, searching, pleasuring as best he knew. His own prick was aching stiff again. If he hadn’t just cum so many times, he probably would have spontaneously exploded all over the sheets. Ridged flesh parted and loosened under his tongue, and he heard Verpa grunting softly as he quested deeper into his rectal fathoms.

“That’s enough,” said Verpa, and Flitch stopped. He noticed Verpa wasn’t very hard yet.

“Did I do it wrong?” he asked.

“No, you’re doing fine. I just don’t want to deal with a second round for me, tonight. It always takes about forever. You, though, let’s milk that little prick so you can sleep.”

The words ought to have been humiliating, but they felt arousing, almost endearing, to Flitch. His prick _was_ smaller than Verpa’s, anyway, as were most people’s. Verpa stroked him expertly, and in a couple minutes he was arching again, spilling into Verpa’s hand.

“Will the innkeeper know?” asked Flitch sleepily, afterwards, head resting on Verpa’s chest.

“Probably not. We weren’t loud, and we didn’t get much on the bed. Most of it ended up on me. Should’ve made you lick it off, but it mostly dried before I thought about it. I’m sure they’ve dealt with worse on the sheets.”

“’S nice being in the same bed. Mama kicked me out of hers as soon as I could walk. Put a screen in the corner for me, and the rest was for her customers. Stopped going home much at all before I was ten.”

“You’ll adapt to the road quickly, then.”

“D’you keep a house anywhere?”

“Not for a long time. In a couple cities, I have arrangements to store things—mostly clothes for different climates. Banks in trade cities often offer that. I’ll show you when we get to the Red City.”

Flitch mumbled something, but it was too sleep-garbled to hear. Verpa stayed awake a few minutes longer, trying to get comfortable without disturbing the boy. The boy was so…what if Flitch fell in love with him? What was he supposed to do with that? Verpa lusted, or titillated, or harmed, nothing more. Just a boy, he reminded himself. Hardly more than a child. This was probably the first time anyone had ever treated him as more than an obligatory nuisance. He’d get over it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Both these characters have darkvision. Verpa's ass is the Manly Ur-Ass.


	9. Towards the High Pass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Verpa's advice on forensic countermeasures, and his unusual approach to ancient history.

Morning brought cold oat porridge and the same black bread, obviously gone stale since the night before. Flitch choked it down anyway. He felt like he was starving, and he wasn’t sure if it was the unaccustomed exercise, the worms, or a growth spurt. Quite possibly it was all three. Verpa offered him a strip of dried meat out of his bag, and Flitch gnawed on it as they walked out of town.

To his surprise, they did not continue along the river as before, but instead headed inland. Flitch asked why.

“The river is a longer route,” Verpa said. “See those mountains up ahead?”

Flitch did, barely. They were only faint shapes on the northern horizon.

“Well, the river has to find a low point between them,” Verpa continued. “We have legs, so we can take the high pass, which is a shorter route to the Red City. Besides, it’s a good view. And no mosquitoes.”

It did not feel shorter. Even a day’s journey away, the road sloped slightly upward, just a few inches in every tenth of a mile. Not a lot, but enough to be tiring. Verpa seemed unaffected, trudging along briskly like one used to the route—which he was. Flitch saw a few other towns in the distance, but Verpa made no detours.

“I just sold them my wares the last time through here,” he said. “I doubt they’ll be needing thread and spices again so soon.”

“Did you infect any of them?”

“That one in the northwest—Three Wells—already had the measles going round, so I put a gentler strain in the mix. Otherwise, no. It’s too risky, mostly, when you’re the only outsider. I could sneak in and contaminate stuff and then pretend to ‘arrive’ later when it’s in full swing, but then I might get caught, and it delays my legitimate business.”

“How often do you actually get to infect people?” asked Flitch, sounding a bit petulant.

“Considerably less often than I like.” Verpa sighed. “Okay, rules. One, bigger is better. More population, more people going in and out, the harder it is to pin down the origin of anything. So you hit big towns and cities, not little villages, most of the time. Crestley’s actually on the small end of what I’d hit, and if it weren’t something of a minor trade hub, I’d have passed it by—and also if I hadn’t hit Three Rivers the last last time I was there. Remember any news from winter before last?”

“Like, disease news? Not really.”

“It probably wouldn’t have stood out, in winter. Just a particularly unpleasant influenza. Lots of snot, some diarrhea. Not everyone who gets it has the diarrhea, but when they do...watching someone sneeze until they shit themselves is amazing. I never got tired of it. But anyway, rule two: put some time between outbreaks. At least a year and a half. Otherwise, it looks like a pattern. People are really good at spotting patterns. I don’t know if anywhere still has secret police keeping constant records of what traders are in the city, for bigger places where one would normally blend in, but I know some pre-collapse kingdoms used to. They made everyone carry these book things called ‘passports,’ and they had special scripts on them that only machines could read, and if you didn’t have one or if it was from the wrong kingdom, the secret police could lock you up in prisons forever.”

“That sounds awful!” said Flitch. He’d been in jail a couple times, and it wasn’t a cushy experience. “Why would they lock someone up for not having a book? Was it like a god-text or something?”

“It was more about what kingdom you were born in. Apparently the pre-collapse kingdoms really didn’t want people moving from one kingdom to another without permission. I guess almost everyone was serfs or something. I don’t know. I was mostly reading those books because of all the diseases everyone in the secret police prisons always got. Like apparently in some of them, practically all of the prisoners got diarrhea because the food was bad.”

“All of them?” asked Flitch.

“Yeah. And it was like all the time, too, because the food was always bad.”

“Wow. I mean, it’s weird that they were all locked up, but it’s cool that they were all having the runs all the time.” Flitch pursed his lips. “But are you sure it’s real, though? It doesn’t make sense to lock up a bunch of people just because they’re in the wrong kingdom. Don’t serfs usually work the fields and stuff, in countries with them?” (In The Edge, denoting the region between the Rubble Waste and the Southern Mountains, of which Crestley and Three Rivers and so on were part, serfdom had mostly been abolished.) “I mean, if you’re a lord with serfs, and you lock up other lords’ serfs for trespassing, don’t the other lords want their serfs back? And then you’ve got to have your own serfs or maybe vassals guard the locked up serfs, and that means fewer people to do anything else. Why would they do that?”

“I think the lords and vassals just wanted to torture or kill as many of someone else’s serfs as they could, for the sake of it. Like, they weren’t sure they could win a war against the other person, but if his serfs ran away and ended up in their own lands, they’d take it out on the serfs. Or maybe they just wanted to do those things to somebody but didn’t dare use their own people. I dunno.” Verpa huffed. “Let’s be real, if I were a lord, I’d probably take any excuse to force people to have diarrhea. Most lords don’t know what ‘no’ is, after all.”

“What about what we do?” Flitch asked.

“Okay, I guess it’s sort of getting around ‘no,’ but at least we’re not rubbing it in their faces that we ignore it. We make it look natural. Anyone can get sick. But like a lord could force a serf to drink infected shit and know it, and no one would care, who could do anything about it.”

“Gods, that would be so hot,” said Flitch, one hand straying to his rapidly tenting crotch.

“Are you kidding me? It _would_ be hot. But I know better than to do it. At least, not without them wanting it, or me paying for it, and that’s more than I can afford. And then I’d probably have to not tell them about the infected part, or they still wouldn’t. But I don’t have the clout to force someone to do it and get away with it, and I’m not into kidnapping or killing people so they can’t identify me. Really don’t like killing. It’s messy in a bad way and almost universally illegal. Really don’t like being hanged, either, and I’ve got experience with both.”

“I’m not interested in being the one drinking shit, for what it’s worth,” said Flitch.

“Wasn’t expecting you to be. I’m not, either. It’s the infecting part that’s hot.”

“Yeah.” After a few moments, Flitch spoke up again. “Tell me more about the prisoners having diarrhea.”

  


There was no inn before the pass. The high pass was too narrow for wagons, and difficult for horses, and far out of the way from the river, so by itself it couldn’t support a whole village. Geep and cattle herders used the pastures, but they homed to a couple of other towns several miles away. So instead of an inn, there was an empty cabin, just a hearth and a few bunks and an attached shelter for animals and firewood. A cupboard marked “Take some, leave some” in three different languages held an assortment of mismatched tableware and preserved foods.

“The clerkhall at the last town back brings flour, oil, and wood every so often, and the rest is just stuff people didn’t want to keep carrying,” explained Verpa.

“Do they have some kind of travel god?” asked Flitch.

“Nah. Herders use this place in bad weather, too. You find places like this in rural areas. In deserts, it’s sandstorm shelters, earth walls and sometimes a well. In the Waste, it’s campsites everyone knows about. You’re supposed to leave it clean and chop more wood if you can.”

“Guess we can’t do anything fun,” said Flitch, crestfallen. He was pretty wound up, having spent the day listening to Verpa talk about plague-ridden ancient atrocities.

Verpa knelt to light the fire. “Can’t make you purge all over the place, if that’s what you mean, but we can fuck, and I can tell you more about me. I’m about played out for ancient plague camps, I’m afraid. I think I’d gotten to my time in the waste?”

“Jorm let you go, right? And then we ran into the Hillhaven guard.”

“Right. So….”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are always appreciated! Also, eventually I'm going to have to draw a map of this continent.


	10. Fitting In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Verpa's account of his first few years outside the Waste, and how he became a trader.

So it was actually around this time that I met Kitty. I spent a couple months running around The Edge first doing odd jobs—it was summer, and then harvest—but by chance I ended up wintering in Three Rivers. Someone had told me it was a good place to get winter work, I think.

Kitty worked at the boarding house where I was staying, back then. She got a room for it, and that gave her a place to take her personal customers, which meant she could charge more for it. At the time, she claimed she was sixteen, which is the minimum age it’s legal to do that work there, but I suspect now she was a bit younger and lying about it. Anyway, she was there, she was pretty, and one night I paid her three silver pennies to sleep with her. It was my first time with another person; I’d always been worried about someone seeing the worms. But she said she wouldn’t mind, as long as I couldn’t get her pregnant. She’d been having trouble getting customers lately, after some man told everyone he got the pox from her. She did have the pox, but so did I, and it’s not like it was going to hurt _me_. Anyway, since I was working nights at a warehouse, and she was working nights cleaning the boarding house and whoring, we ended up becoming friends. Every few weeks, which was how often I could afford it, I’d pay for her time. And then at some point she complained to me about how she couldn’t take clients that day because she had the runs, and I told her I’d pay to see her have them.

She laughed, but then she realized I was serious. “Two pennies,” she said, “since I have to shit anyway.”

“You’re selling yourself short,” I told her. “Most people think it’s disgusting. They’ll pay extra.”

“Yeah, but I like you,” she said. “Also, I need a chamber pot _now_. If you want me to have to wash my skirts after, that’s definitely going to be extra.”

So I followed her up to her room, and watched her squat over the chamber pot and release her bowels. They were wet and gassy, and they came out all at once. She wasn’t actually ill; it was just greasy stew last night and her monthlies coming on. She cleaned herself off and then let me lick her. I don’t think she faked cumming. As far as I know, you can’t fake the pearl drawing up or the faint rush of brine in the quim, even if you can fake the sounds and the clenching. Meanwhile, my worms were writhing from the taste of her diseases, and it was driving me mad. I still kept my hands on her thighs, licking long strokes from ring to pearl, because it was so erotic how she moved under me. You’ve licked her, you know what I mean. And then a couple minutes later she made me stop, because she had to shit again. This time it was darker and more liquid, and it took several spurts to get it all out of her. I’d taken myself in hand the moment her ring began to open, and by the time she was done, I had spurted, myself. I wasn’t much older than you, remember. Afterwards, I slipped an extra two pennies under her pillow.

A few months later, she took pregnant. She’d been using sponges with everyone but me, but they don’t always work. She always gets bad morning sickness, and I liked it. At this point, we’d set up an arrangement so I got to watch every time she had to hurl, since she didn’t have any other clients who were into what I was. I’d gotten promoted at the warehouse, and at the time, I wished I were fertile, so it could be mine and I could have her for myself and watch her puke her way through as many pregnancies as we wanted kids for. I still have dreams about the way she’d hold her stomach when she puked. But then she started bleeding a couple months in.

It left her pretty devastated, and as a side effect, we had a fight. A pretty stupid fight, really. Neither of us actually remembers how it started. Still, the end result was she wouldn’t take my money for a while. Also, it was summer again, and I was tired of working nights while everyone else was at the tavern, just because I can see in the dark. I wanted more practice with controlling the dickworms, too, and I couldn’t do that if I was staying in one place. So I left, and didn’t come back for a couple years.

At first, I was working agriculture in The Edge, like I’d done before. Then I heard from some traders that across the mountains it was a boom year, which means high wages since there’s more to pick, and I might miss the first harvest, but the second would surely be just as good. So I went north. That time, I took the river road, and went on a ferry through the low pass. Funny story: So, at the low pass, some thieves tried to rob the ferry. Only, another group of thieves wanted to do the same thing. They ended up fighting each other and we basically got away free. Anyway, that’s part of why I avoid the low pass. Thieves don’t usually pick the high pass because it’s rarely used and most of the year it’s too fucking cold.

I caught the tail end of the first harvest in the Green Zone, worked the whole of the second cropping, and stayed for the winter planting. They plant things in winter, for the first harvest. Anyway, that’s actually how I got into trading. See, to keep the soil from being played out from the double harvest, they sow these pills of dung and limestone dust after the seeds. When I asked why they didn’t just till in fresh dung, like the people down south did, I was told that drying the dung and turning it into pellets makes it less likely to spread worms, and easier to transport, because it had to be brought in from areas that weren’t as good for cropping. I thought I could make a killing selling these pellets in the south. I spent all my pay for the winter planting and everything I had left from the harvest on a wagonful of pellets and an ox and a wagon to move it in, and had it ferried across the pass.

I managed to sell all of it, eventually. Most people in the south, as you doubtless are aware, were content to use fresh manure from local geep herds on their farms. My main buyer was a nobleman who loved flowers and didn’t want their scent polluted by fresh manure. But at every town I went to, I found that people really wanted little things they couldn’t make for themselves: nicer thimbles, brighter threads, spices that didn’t grow locally. The towns that were further from the established trade routes—I’d ranged pretty far trying to get someone to buy my pellets—wanted these things the most. I also learned about the high pass. So I took what little profit I made from the pellets, sold my ox and cart, and bought a lot of pretty novelties in Three Rivers. (I also made up with Kitty.)

Being a trader gave me a lot of time between places. I discovered I could meditate while walking. I’d always fantasized about infecting people, like the epidemics I’d read about but hadn’t really seen yet, due to always having been out in the country during summers. If I got enough control, I could infect people with something messy but harmless and watch all I liked, without having to explain or pay for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are always appreciated! ~~At this point I'd even take people being mad at me for making them horny, just for some interaction. One-time offer.~~


	11. His First Crime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Verpa describes how he went from trader to serial plague-spreader.

After about a year of practice, I could shed most contagions singly, except for very closely related ones, though still only from where they’re normally shed, at that point. I worked that out over the next few years. I thought it was time for a test. I was apprehensive; up till now, the most I had acted on my urges was paying Kitty to let me watch her shit, or secret satisfaction when some work friend threw up after too much drink, or giving myself diarrhea out in the middle of nowhere. And that was all very pleasant, but I wanted to see people really be sick, contagiously sick, and have it be something I’d done—just like I used to pretend with my dolls, but I was much too old for dolls now. So here I was, sneaking into a small town, with a jar of my own fresh, liquid shit hidden in my jacket.

I went to the well, trying to act like everything was normal. I pretended to dip water with the shit-filled jar, then ‘accidentally’ fumbled it and broke it against the side of the well. The pieces sank to the bottom, and my contaminated shit mixed with the well water.

Of course, I made several mistakes with this first epidemic. First was the disease I chose. I picked a tiny parasite that causes diarrhea. Well enough on its own, but it takes several days to develop—meaning I had to stay quite a long time to see its effects—and not very dramatic. I only saw one person shit themselves, and that was a child. Then, I also chose much too small a town, and was the only new person in town at the time, so they were all pretty sure I had brought in the runs, though they thought I must have just been careless after the privy. I got strongarmed into taking this horrible decoction of herbs made by the local apothecary, which would have shifted the parasite very effectively, and had to throw it up the next time I went to the privy. Manually, too, not from illness, which I hate. The guard wouldn’t let me leave town until I produced a solid stool. Fortunately, I had full control of that!

But no one thought I had done it intentionally, and this made me cocky. Between that and some stereotypes about dark elves that I just didn’t know about at the time—thanks, Doc Shaper—that eventually led to the time where I was hanged. I’ve told you that one. I’d contaminated too many towns in a row, I hadn’t stopped to think that several of them were served by the same cleric, and so they were looking for me.

I knew I had to leave the entire area for a while. I went far north, much further than I’d been before. That’s when I dropped ‘Kalki’ as my use-name and started going by ‘Dick Maudlin,’ which is what Kitty still calls me. It’s a translation of my name for myself, in a sense. ‘Ivak Assan’ came later, but mostly just to sound more northern. In the north, that helps people trust you, and in the south, it sounds exotic. Both boost sales.

Anyway, I stayed in the north for a few years, working some trade routes there. It’s good cover for people like us; there’s no real winter, just a rainy season, so insects and water spread lots of diseases anyway. And there are nomadic groups that don’t have enough people to maintain smithies, so I’d sell them needles and knives, and they’d give me drugs and poisons and valuable alchemical compounds in return, which no one in the big cities down there wants to go harvest because it’s too remote and dangerous. Everyone won, basically. Well, except the people in the cities, who’d get extra plagues because I was there. I’d start something, and I’d get back six weeks later and it would still be going, though generally not in the same quarter I’d left it. Or, quite frequently, something else would crop up—half the time, that’d be cholera—and I’d take advantage and watch it happen. And then eventually it had been enough time that I thought it safe enough to do a longer loop, and I’ve been doing variations of that ever since. This time, I originally planned to go past Crestley, along towards Wyrd Crags, before going back north, but I found you, and I also heard about something new going around up north. So, here we are.


	12. March of Desperation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Verpa fucks Flitch, pisses up his ass, and makes him hold it. Flitch makes it outside the cabin but not to the latrine. Short chapter, but 100% porn.

“That’s it?” asked Flitch. He’d been hoping there would be more good parts. (Good parts being the kind worth jerking off to.)

“Pretty much. I mean, there are some stories of funny things that happened, or weird things that happened, or times I almost got killed, but other than the time I got hanged, it’s not really related to the epidemics thing or how I got here or why I do what I do. I mean, both the Rubble Waste and the northern rainforest are full of weird stuff and want to kill you. That’s just how they are. Only one’s cold most of the year and in places radioactive, and the other’s warm most of the year and full of venomous things that want to eat you. Well, eat me. Not sure they’d want to eat you.”

“Great, even snakes are prejudiced now.”

“Nah, they just might not like how you taste.”

“Uh...unlike you?” asked Flitch.

Verpa chuckled. “Yes, I’d like to taste more of you, for sure.”

Flitch let Verpa flip him over the bottom bunk and tried to relax as Verpa squeezed his monstrous cock inside him. It would feel good, in a minute. There was plenty of grease, he could smell it, it was just such a stretch to take in that much mass all at once. He felt like an apple on a coring machine. Every time Verpa pulled back, it felt like he was going to pull his guts out of his hole, and every time he slammed in...the pressure on his chestnut was almost painful, really, but the hurt was _good_. Flitch wasn’t sure if he was leaking or cumming as the blanket beneath him grew slick, but his whole body tingled from his nipples to his fingers to his toes and back to the gland in his ass again, while his cock rubbed on the dampening blanket and sent its own contrasting frisson into his belly. When he felt the hot blasts of Verpa’s cum inside him, he groaned in disappointment, because he wasn’t ready to come down from that infernally divine sensation yet.

“Piss inside me,” he begged, clamping down around Verpa’s softening cock to keep him from slipping out.

“Are you sure? You’ll have to hold it long enough to get outside the cabin. Maybe longer, if I can find something to plug you up so I can watch you cramp with it.”

“Please!”

“Then take it.” Verpa relaxed and began to piss.

The hot fluid rushed into Flitch’s bowels. He felt his stomach swell with it, distending with the warm flood, as the stream of Verpa’s piss hit directly against his prostate. Flitch wailed with delight as he ground his cock against the bed, staining the already damp fabric even as the first cramps stirred in his intestines.

“I’m going to pull out now,” warned Verpa.

Flitch experienced a slithering sort of increasing, devastating emptiness, followed by an audible, wet pop. Verpa immediately replaced penis with thumb, holding the liquid inside Flitch’s guts as he adjusted.

“Can you hold it?”

“I think so.” Flitch stood with a groan, holding his bloated stomach and squeezing his buttocks tightly together. Slowly, he shuffled towards the door.

“Ah! I’m leaking!” he gasped, as he leaned forward to reach for the latch. A trickle of Verpa’s piss ran down his leg.

“Easy, now. Clench your ring, not your buttocks.”

Flitch stood, desperation writ on his face, clearly on the brink of losing control. At last, however, he mastered himself, and then he opened the door and stepped outside.

The pit latrine was behind the cabin. In total, it was twenty agonizing feet. Forty steps, at the pace Flitch was going. Verpa followed him, supporting him. With every step, hot piss threatened to surge out of Flitch’s well-fucked hole. The cramping had taken hold in earnest, increased by the toxins in Verpa’s piss, and he was nearly bent double as his guts squeezed around the liquid invasion.

They rounded the second corner of the cabin, finally in sight of the latrine. But that sight broke Flitch’s limit, just with its implicit signal of “defecate here.” Flitch released his load with a despairing moan as his ring gave way involuntarily, mingled piss and shit running down his bare legs. Then, as the first explosion subsided, he ran the last few feet to the latrine and squatted over it, releasing the rest of the piss enema and a  couple of more solid logs that had been in waiting.

He looked up to find Verpa stroking himself, though he was still soft.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it,” he said.

“That was the hottest thing I’ve seen since you shat on my dick in Three Rivers,” said Verpa. “All those cramps, and then you just gave way helplessly! I thought I was going to cum again. I just cared about getting you outside the cabin first so we wouldn’t have to clean up.”

“Still gonna have to clean the blanket,” muttered Flitch. “And I’m covered in piss.”

“I’ll get that blanket. It needs washed anyway.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for not posting for so long! Comments are appreciated. Suggestions for diseases or scenarios would be great, though I can't guarantee anything (it has to fit with the plot I've already got, and, surprisingly, I actually do have a couple squicks). And the Discord server is still active (someone asked; I think I've already got it linked in the fic endnotes), and in fact just got a bunch of new people from an [emeto server](https://discord.gg/WnGHuGT) I joined recently! (Kink overlap, to no one's surprise lol.) I'm also working on a couple of other things, some of which are super kinky. And I am commissionable, bc gotta pay bills and it's the holidays; my email is whydoihavethiskink@yahoo.com if you've got an idea!


	13. Over the Pass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Verpa and Flitch journey over the High Pass. There is an unexpected problem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's emeto!

Flitch woke up feeling pleasantly sore and used, which was starting to become a regular thing, lately. Verpa was already up, making some kind of porridge over the fire. Flitch slipped out to the latrine for a piss, regretting that Verpa couldn’t watch him. Then again, he would have plenty of other chances. As he tied his pants after, he realized that it no longer hurt to piss. Flitch felt a momentary pang of loss, but only a small one; after all, it had not been a very enjoyable symptom. And he was still contagious. He wondered what would be next to show. A rash, or a chancre—

His stomach growled. Flitch realized that breakfast was for once more urgent than wanking.

Verpa nodded as he re-entered the cabin, and handed Flitch a bowl. Wheat porridge. This had been a luxury back home, where the main crop, on what land could be cropped, was oats. In Crestley. Flitch reminded himself to stop thinking of it as home.

“Today we’re going over the pass,” said Verpa, eating his own porridge. “You ever been up a mountain before?”

Flitch shook his head.

“The path is not like it’s been this far. It’s pretty steep and can be slippery. Stay away from the edge, don’t fool around, and if I tell you to do something, do it. There probably won’t be any bandits, but there very well could be wild animals.”

“Okay,” said Flitch, around a mouthful of porridge.

Soon they had double-checked that they had not left anything behind and gotten their packs strapped on, and begun to trek up the mountains, which were no longer in the distance, but rising up before them, just a continuation of the slope that the rest cabin was already on. And by noon, the mountain as anything like a whole was no longer something that could be seen, just an endless uphill studded with trees as a hairbrush is studded with bristles, and a mostly-cleared smear of a trail. For now, it went straight, not quite being steep enough to zigzag yet. Flitch’s legs protested, despite the supportive braces. Verpa was silent, striding ahead, not seeming to look back at Flitch yet not letting him fall too far behind. Perhaps Verpa was used to the route. In any case, his only concession to the slope was the lack of stories, and that might simply have been that he’d come to the end of his autobiography. The trees increasingly became piney things, as opposed to the leafy plane and beech trees more common below in that area, and suddenly the path turned sharply to avoid a jutting outcrop of rock. Then it hairpinned up the other direction, so steeply that someone had placed now-rotting logs as rudimentary steps till it leveled out above the outcrop.

Verpa called a halt for lunch. (Flitch flopped onto the ground, landed on his braces, and cursed, holding his hip.) “Really should replace those with stone, one of these trips,” he remarked, around a mouthful of dried fruit.

“Are we near the top yet?” asked Flitch, then tried to use his canteen without sitting up.

“It’s a few more hours. Pretty soon we’re going to meet one of the tributaries to the river route—this slope we’ve been climbing is like a nose on the face of the mountain, and the creek runs to the side of it like the mountain’s sweat or tears, as they say—and then we follow that to the top of the pass, which is a little valley between two real summits. It’s still below the treeline, though.”

“Treeline?” asked Flitch. What lord would be having fields cleared up here?

“Where it’s too high and cold for any real trees to grow. It does start to get scrubby up near the pass, but it isn’t really bare until several hundred feet above it.”

“Oh.”

After lunch, the trail became progressively rockier and more sideways. Huge blocks of stone increasingly blocked the way upwards, like part of hill had been sheared off by some giant blow down into the rocks. Or maybe there had been some pre-collapse building here, though Flitch could not imagine what it could have been. What on earth could anyone want to build in a place like this? It was not wide enough for a cart, let alone level enough, so it could hardly be some kind of waystation, and Flitch could not imagine anything else being built here. He followed Verpa along a precarious route of sloping paths, small ladders, and edges of rocks just barely navigable by a man with a large pack. Flitch wondered just how much of the infrastructure Verpa himself built or maintained, this far up. He also realized, after barely managing to climb a ladder onto a slippery, narrow ledge, that this had to be even worse on the way down. Flitch wondered if it wasn’t safer paying tithe to bandits.

Or maybe Verpa went this way because it was difficult. As Flitch was rapidly learning, it would be nearly impossible for someone unfamiliar with the route to find the way without a guide, much less travel it quickly. Meanwhile, Verpa scaled it with little less apparent ease or speed than he had had on the flat country roads. Many of the paths were almost invisible to the uninitiated eye, and often near seemingly obvious paths that were, according to Verpa, not where one wanted to go. (Not that he was currently explaining why.) To Flitch, who had done his fair share of running away from people who were violently angry with him, it seemed much like the maze of alleys, fences, and roofs he’d so often lost pursuers in. He suspected that Verpa used this place in part to avoid people who suspected him of starting plagues.

His suspicions were all but confirmed when they finally met the creek. Well, it was something between a very large creek and a very small river. It was by no means large enough for the sort of river barges he’d seen in Three Rivers, but it was considerably larger than what he’d thought of as “creeks” back in Crestley. In any case, at this point in the mountains, it was almost entirely rocky rapids and small waterfalls, with the only deep places being the pools at the feet of the waterfalls, carved out by spring floods but at this time of the year now relatively calm.

But on the other side of the creek, there was a road. Not much of a road, but wide enough for a cart with some shoulder room, if one were willing to be a bit cruel to the oxen forced to pull such a thing. Flitch saw switchbacks drizzling down the mountain near the creek, in the relatively smooth floodbed—this could not have been a spring route—heading in the direction of what he was pretty sure was, in fact, Hillhaven. He suspected that this road was the turn Verpa had gone past about the middle of yesterday morning.

They stopped to drink from the creek, and Flitch asked Verpa, voicing his suspicion.

“I wanted you to know this way.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” exclaimed Flitch, wondering if he shouldn’t just go back down by the easy route and lose himself in the teeming crowds of Three Rivers. That had worked pretty well for Verpa for the better part of a decade, after all.

“Well, would you _want_ to sleep in the cold up on top of the pass? Which is what we would have done, if we’d taken the cartroad. Besides, you never know when you’ll need the Woodwarrens, or that rest hut. And if you hadn’t complained, I would have shown you some caves that are very good for hiding in, at need, but I’m not, now.”

“Is that you’re way of saying I slow you down?” asked Flitch.

“Okay, I was on the fence about it already, since I usually get here two hours earlier by this route, but now I’m particularly disinclined.” Verpa finished refilling his canteen and put the stopper in it.

“How do we _cross_ the river? Creek. Whatever this thing is.”

“Stepping stones.” Verpa pointed them out. It seemed quite obvious, once Flitch knew what to look for.

After that, the path was still steep, but much more manageable. As Verpa had said, the trees started to get “scrubby,” turning from a pine forest into a pine barren, especially in near the creek where the spring floods kept anything from getting too firmly established.

The light seemed different, up here. The sky had gone overcast, during the morning, and it was as if the peaks around the pass were a funnel that splattered diffused yet impossibly white light down on them. The ground seemed to be leveling out, and far in the distance, far enough that it could not possibly be anything in this mountain range, there was a greenish-bluish-greyish smudge of land peeking through the “frame.” Suddenly the river curved, tracking up the taller of the peaks that met to make the pass...running down it; Flitch’s brain caught up with the facts of gravity after a second. The climb must have tired him. Certainly the pack felt twice as heavy as it had in the morning, pressing on his back and cramping his lungs. He attempted to adjust the straps.

Verpa turned just in time to see Flitch stumbling. At first he thought he’d tripped over something. Then he realized that the path was better than that, and that Flitch really needed to sit down.

“What the fuck,” he muttered to himself. “I saw him eat lunch, and we’re not that high up...Oh, fuck me. Dwelf. _Half dwarf._ ” Dwarves were meant to live a mile underground. They did okay on most of the surface, but you didn’t take them into mountains, even lowish ones, because this happened. Of all the traits Flitch could have inherited from his mother, this had to be one of them. By the time Verpa had processed this thought, he had already helped Flitch sit down and gotten his pack off. Flitch leaned forward, breathing much too rapidly, then abruptly vomited into the dust, splattering the ground with the remains of the dried fruit and jerky he had eaten for lunch.

It just  _kept coming_ . Flitch could not stop trying to launch his stomach out of his mouth. His belly didn’t even hurt, at least until after the first few rounds; the nausea was all in his throat, and even breathing was enough to make him gag and retch. Of course, his throat just got more sensitive with each spew of bitter acid. Soon it was mostly spit and bile coming out of his mouth, as he dizzily lay on his side and let it spill out of him.

Verpa was no fool, and even if he had been, he had read everything he could find about diseases back when he lived with the Shaper. He knew how to treat altitude sickness; obviously he had to get Flitch off the mountain, and find either an alternate route on the way back or else a way to prevent this. The question was  _how_ to get Flitch down from the pass without a horse or a cart. He considered trying to bring Flitch’s altitude tolerance up towards what a pure elf of any sort would have, but even if he managed to communicate with Flitch’s worm successfully, and the worm was compatible enough with Flitch to force his body to produce more EPO, it would still take a couple days before the end result of more red blood cells happened. Flitch would probably vomit himself into a rupture before then; it looked like a vasovagal feedback loop more than just altitude sickness by this point. No, there was nothing for it but to get Flitch off the mountain. That probably meant leaving the packs behind. He couldn’t carry Flitch  _and_ a pack. Verpa went to look for someplace to conceal the packs.

An idea struck him. He had a handaxe, and rope, and nails that he had meant to sell later on, but were more than worth the time savings. He could make a travois, and it would likely be sufficient to get both Flitch and the packs down the mountain—though probably worthless once the green wood started to cure. It would probably take about two hours. Verpa found the nails, and some throat lozenges for Flitch (which seemed to help a little), and got to work on chopping down the straightest of the scrub trees.

“Straightest” was not really anything like “straight.” This was going to wobble, and badly. Verpa still bound his “runners” together, making their curvier ends meet in a point, and then untied them and notched them to fit together better. Then he bound them again, and nailed them for good measure. Then he nailed shorter lengths across them. Verpa tried lying down on his travois. It was manifestly uncomfortable, but it held.

Verpa layered his and Flitch’s spare cloaks across the travois, and then helped a disoriented and miserable Flitch onto it. Then he tied Flitch and the packs to it with Flitch’s coil of rope, reasoning that Flitch could throw up on his own rope if he had to throw up on a rope at all, and then tied the remainder of his coil (which was already tied to the travois) into a harness so he could pull it. He adjusted his knife so he could cut the rope easily in case of emergencies, the most dangerous possibility being that the travois could decide to take its own route down the mountain. The damned thing had to weigh at least three hundred fifty pounds, loaded, and it didn’t have brakes.

It was after dark, and Verpa had blisters under his armpits, by the time he reached the Cloudwatcher’s  H ouse, about two hundred feet vertically downward (and about four miles of actual path) from the top of the pass. Flitch was still a bit whiffy, but at least he wasn’t puking on everything.

“You brought a dwelf over the pass, Assan?” Ren Cloudwatcher asked, adding a log to the stove and putting water on for tea.

“It’s barely a mile up! Didn’t think it would be that bad, for a half.” Verpa contorted himself, smearing salve on the rope burns. Well, shirt-under-rope burns. The worms would keep him from getting an infection, but it stung, and the salve would help it heal faster. Besides, it would look odd if he forwent it.

“Well, looks like it runs blood-true.” Cloudwatcher spooned dried herbs into the kettle, and the smell of peppermint filled the room.

“Apparently.”

The Cloudwatcher’s  H ouse was part weather station, part inn. It really should have been higher up, but nothing upwards was really fit to build on,  and it also shortened the distance for the couriers who came up from the lowlands . The next bit of right-sized open land was the top of the pass, and that flooded every spring, as the edges of the glacier on the high peak thawed. To compensate for the height, the Cloudwatcher had a long periscope and watched the weather patterns through a series of mirrors. The whole thing rotated on a turntable. Being Cloudwatcher was a hereditary position. Ren Cloudwatcher’s family might have had some other surname once, but enough generations had passed, with strategic adoptions at points, that the only one known was now Cloudwatcher.

Ren would also have to strategically adopt at some point—he’d come to the role early, and it did not exactly lend itself to getting around with the ladies, even making the assumption that he leaned that way—but for now, he was the sole permanent resident of the Cloudwatcher’s House, and he really only occupied the attic and the kitchen. Most of the ground floor was shut down, opened only on the rare occasions when overnight travelers needed it. (Flitch was currently curled up in one of the bedrooms, with a bucket just in case.) He did not charge—traditionally, none of the Cloudwatchers ever had—but it was customary for traders to leave something of approximately sufficient value to compensate for food and firewood.

“You want the travois?” Verpa asked. “Not sure how good it’ll be, made out of green wood and all, but I don’t think F...aad is going to need it after the morning.”

“Could be useful,” Cloudwatcher agreed, “Specially in the snows.”

“And I’ve got some good herbs, if you’re interested. Maybe some needles.”

“I’ll look in the morning,” Cloudwatcher said, carrying a mug of honeyed peppermint tea to Flitch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Discord server is still a thing, if you're interested! We're considerably less scary than we look!

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this work and would like more epidemic/scat content, [join my Discord server!](https://discord.gg/h6DYxDY)


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